As of today, Microsoft won't allow manufacturers to install XP on new netbooks," says blogger Kevin Fogarty. "That doesn't mean corporate customers who special-order hardware with XP won't be able to get it, or even that its market share ( 60 percent!) will drop any time soon.... It just means XP has taken the first babystep toward obsolescence and the long (really long, considering its market share) slide down toward the pit of minor operating systems like the MacOS X (4.39 percent) , Java ME (.95 percent) and "Other" (which I think is an alternative spelling for "Linux" (.85 percent).

Keeping XP alive wasn't the clincher imho, it was the god awful Linux installations chosen by the major netbook OEMs. They were either horrifically out of date (Acer/Linpus), or completely broken (Asus/Xandros). What customers got as a result was a broken device that wouldn't do what they wanted it to do. That's what killed Linux. Dell's Ubuntu option was just too little, too late and it didn't help that Dell used the seriously out of date by then 8.04 LTS release that didn't even have Firefox 3. Linux might have worked if the OEMs hadn't turned it into a fiasco.

Oh my, a two-year-old OS. What were they thinking? That can't possibly be useful!

Perhaps when the Linux world stops living in la-la-land and finally figures out that it's insane that you can't upgrade your damn browser unless you also upgrade the whole OS, then Linux might enjoy a bit of success.

As long as the current attitude prevails and there's always someone else to blame, it's just going nowhere.

No, a two year old os wasn't the problem in and of itself. That would have worked, except that the applications you had access to were *also* two years out of date. That's why it didn't work. The OEMs could've made sure to actually provide updated versions of the apps they wanted to ship, or at least provided an option for users to get them. They did not, and that's just talking about Dell. Dell would've had a chance to make it work had they taken the time to realize that the applications were important, not just the os. What the others like Asus did was far worse, the installations shipped with were actually broken. Busted. Updates did not work at all, the GUI crashed, the Wifi was intermittent, and to install anything at all you had to drop to the CLI. Ridiculous. XP itself *is* out of date, and it shows when you need to maintain it, but at least getting updated versions of apps for it is easy.
As for blame, the real problem here is the way Linux systems handle software installation, but I blame the OEMs in this case because they already knew what they'd have to deal with and rather than dealing with it they shipped something broken or hopelessly outdated that only a geek could've updated without screwing it up. They knew what they were getting into, and didn't go all the way to make it work, so yes they're to blame in this case for sheer laziness if nothing else. I didn't expect much else though, given how badly they screw up their windows installs it was inevitable they'd screw up Linux too. That's why the very first thing I do if I purchase a computer from an OEM is to wipe the crap install they've got and put whatever I want on it, because they can't touch anything without soiling it.